A Tale of Three Campers
Mid-Range Comfort
By Alissa Mears
As the only female on our gear odyssey, my place as middleman was a given. No nerve-racking coin-toss for me. The Sherpani Alpina 55 backpack (love the Latin feminine derivation) is specially fit for the womanly physique, and this mid-price pack ($169; www.sherpani.us) ensured my middle-of-the-road status.
After suffering the mind-snapping Washington, D.C., rush hour, we greeted the Shenandoah serenity with the enthusiasm of a pack of tromping gazelle. Tent assembly became a silent but viciously competitive race. While I didn't win, my Big Agnes Seedhouse 2 ($199; www.bigagnes.com) went up with impressive speed. The tent conveniently has all poles connected by two central hubs, which keeps pole loss and embarrassing requests for slapdash surrogates from fellow campers to a minimum. Another bonus for the absentminded camper: Big Agnes includes 13 tent stakes, enough to safely lose a few over the weekend.
Race finished, we chucked our stuff in the tents and, sans bags, made a record-breaking, calf-stabbing summit of the park favorite, Old Rag. True to her name, the trek left us wrung out and hungry for our sleeping bags. Once back at camp and ready for bed, I searched instinctively for a zipper, forgetting that GoLite's 40-degree Fly-Lite ($99; www.golite.com) also means fly-less. A relationship with one's gear is uncannily resonant of our human relations: a battle that calls for comfort, durability, flexibility, and some inevitable give-and-take. And in this struggle, a basic, light, and reasonably priced sleeping bag might spell a lack of certain amenities—like room for nocturnal squirmings. I stuffed my damp self into the bag, and exhaustion took over before any claustrophobic feeling of mummification could ensue.
While I went to bed a pupa in its chrysalis, I sadly did not emerge the butterfly the next morning. A healthy rain shower had put the tents to the test, and my Seedhouse didn't earn the highest grade on this account; the sides were damp and some water had edged in at the bottom (next time, I'd opt to carry the tent's footprint for an extra $30). The percolation put the zipper-less sleeping bag in good stead, however. My elusive knight in ripstop nylon, while damp on the outside, remained impressively dry on the inside, and wasn't the slightest bit soggy when it came time to pack up for the day's hike.
Honestly, when I first unfurled the Fly-Lite bag, I thought I'd been mistaken for the pauper in our camping triumvirate. The bag comes in a canvas-colored sack that looks like it's seen the better part of our country's rail system. Appearances doth deceive, however, and this Army-surplus-looking sack exhibited surprising oomph. The two-pound one-ounce lightweight excels in its weight class with a tear strength of nine and a half pounds. The silicone-elastomere fabric (called SilLite) doesn't sponge up water, and the stow sack's looseness meant the bag was stuffed quickly and effortlessly (this is also thanks to the compressibility of the sleeping bag's Polarguard Delta insulation).
The Big Agnes tent snapped apart as smoothly as soggy polyester can, and we set out early for Whiteoak Canyon. Before the uphill lug replaced conversation with wheezing, I was applauding the comfortable fit of my Sherpani pack. While I'm fairly certain even feminine, pear-shaped men wouldn't be caught dead in a flower-fringed backpack (not to mention those exhibiting that primordial, unshaven, this-mountain-is-mine persona), the three-pound five-ounce Sherpani proved much more than mere frills. The hardy bag is designed for multi-day backpacking trips and winter climbing where gender forms no part of the equation. The dual-density waist belt, while contoured, is firm enough to support up to 85 pounds (as if!) and adjusts to any woman's frame. Obviously, the ski slots and snowboard retainer straps went unused during this June trip to the Shenandoah hills, but I took advantage of the other primo features. The waterproof side access zippers made those searches for an extra pair of socks and Band-Aids that much easier, and the protective turtleback panel fitted with an inset pocket kept my sunglasses snug and unscathed. The side hydration pockets provided easy access to water during the hike, and an additional strap kept the bottles secure, even when tripping through streams and screaming through stinging nettles.
Since the National Park Service has yet to endorse beer vendors in the wilderness, we chose to enjoy a civilized cup of tea at the end of the second day's long hike. That gave me another excuse to play with my favorite toy of the camping trip: the Brunton Optimus Crux stove ($75; www.brunton.com). As a young girl scout, I thought rubbing sticks and banging stones together was clever, but taking an hour and change to get a flame no longer seems quite so ingenuous. Three minutes to boil water with only the flick of a lighter—now that is brilliant. In its protective neoprene case, the 3.1-ounce collapsed stove is smaller than most makeup compacts. The stove attaches to the top of a butane canister and an adjustable flame diffuser unfolds to prevent spot burning. For a weekend camping trip, one butane canister was plenty (especially when two other stoves were being tested simultaneously), but on longer trips, the one hindrance of this near-perfect contraption is that the fuel provides only about an hour of cook time.
My Big Agnes domicile dried quickly once I let her out of the backpack (tent setup was even one minute faster than the first night). But the tent proved to be not quite as expansive as her company's name purports; she narrows out considerably at the back, and I'm not sure how you'd fit two slumbering heads comfortably. While my Seedhouse two-person tent only offers nine more inches of horizontal headroom than its one-person sibling (43 inches total; $169), the Seedhouse 3 provides a generous additional 40 inches of combined head and foot space (72 inches and 62 inches, respectively; $239). Bonuses of both the Seedhouse 2 and 3 tents are the side access zippers for storage space under the tent fly. A plastic window on the tent's vestibule door offers a nice spy hole, but I thought skylights for stargazing would've been perfect for our final starry night in the wild.
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